Married to the concept of an endless “war on terrorism,” progressives of Kagan’s sort represent an imminent menace: an authoritarian tendency that could usher in an era of internal repression such as only writers of dystopian science fiction have previously imagined.
Instead of abolishing the Bush era expansions of unlimited government power, they are building on them – and upping the ante. With their boundless faith in government power as an essentially beneficent force in the world, and their pathetic eagerness to prove their “national security” bona fides, this administration is potentially far more of a threat to our civil liberties than the Bush people ever were – and the Kagan nomination is yet more evidence this malign potential is being fully realized.
The final nail in the coffin of the Kagan nomination, as far as I’m concerned, is her close association, for a number of years, with the firm of Goldman Sachs, serving on its legal “advisory board.” This board is being portrayed, by Kagan’s defenders, as a chiefly ceremonial body, which held a few conferences and did nothing much else. This is given as a reason to downplay the Goldman Sachs connection, but it doesn’t ameliorate the moral meaning of her role in putting a legalistic face on the naked avarice and influence-buying engaged in by those crooks.